In Search of Principled Distinctions

Question One:

IF A STATE GOVERNMENT MAY NOT COMPEL A JEHOVAH WITNESS TO PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG, AGAINST HIS RELIGIOUS BELIEFS, AS A CONDITION TO ATTENDING PUBLIC SCHOOL, THEN WHY MAY A STATE GOVERNMENT COMPEL AN EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN TO PHOTOGRAPH A SAME-SEX COMMITMENT CEREMONY AGAINST HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS, AS A CONDITION TO OPERATING A PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS?

Other than the sympathies of the members of the judiciary, I can ascertain no principled distinction between these two cases.  If objective principles were applied to both cases equally, both cases should have had the same outcome: freedom from State compulsion to act against one's desires and religious beliefs.  The principles which should protect us against such compulsion (which were applied to the student who didn't want to say the Pledge, but not to the photographer who didn't want to photograph an event she disapproved of) include the following:

-"[N]o official, high or petty, can [under our constitution] prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." (Justice Jackson, W. Va State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)[emphasis added].)

-"[G]overnment coercion of moral agency is odious."  Gilardi v. U.S. (D.C. Cir. 2013).

-"Penalties are impertinent" if they are used to "compel men to quit the light of their own reason, and oppose the dictates of their own consciences."  (John Locke 1689).

-"Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief [i.e., a belief a particular citizen believes to be repugnant] nor penalize or discriminate against individuals because they hold religious views abhorrent to the authorities."  Justice Brennan, Sherbert v. Verner (1963).

The creation of so-called "Human Rights Commissions" in some of the states is perhaps one of the most misguided political movements of my lifetime, being based on the Orwellian notion that the primary threat to our human rights is our fellow citizens, not our government, to whom we should look for protection from such abuses.  It was therefore inevitable that the "petty officials" of one of these absurd bodies, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, would prove where the true threat to human rights lies, and begin violating the Constitutionally guaranteed liberties of New Mexico's citizens, and issue an "impertinent penalty" against a photographer who declined on religious grounds to accept the patronage of a same-sex couple who wanted her to photograph their committment ceremony.  How exactly was this decision upheld by the New Mexico Supreme Court?  On what principled basis did they determine that the commission, and their own court, could "force" the photographer "by . . . act" to participate in the new political orthodoxy of our time, requiring all of us to celebrate homosexuality and same-sex weddings, and thereby compel affirmation of a belief the photographer felt was repugnant, and, literally "penalize" the photographer "because" she held "religious views abhorrent to the authorities" on the commission?  On what basis were the monetary penalties they imposed upon the photographer, compelling her to "quit the light of her own reason and oppose the dictates of her own conscience" appropriate?

These are of course silly questions.  The court's decision was an exercise of pure political power, unmoored from any objectively applicable principles whatsoever.  Indeed, it was a refutation of the very idea that such objectively and universally applicable principles should ever apply, especially when there is a political victory to be won, liberal pieties to be upheld, and blasphemous political heretics to be punished.

Whatever your views on same-sex marriage, if you are an American, this should scare you.

Question Two:

WHY DO SO MANY OF THE SAME PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT CLIVEN BUNDY AND HIS ANTI-RULE OF LAW SUPPORTERS IN BUNKERVILLE WERE HEREOES, NOW ARGUE THAT MICHAEL BROWN, AND HIS ANTI-RULE OF LAW SUPPORTERS IN FERGUSON ARE THUGS?

Again, I can see no principled distinction between certain groups of citizens' very different reactions to these two cases.

Cliven Bundy used the threat of physical violence to continue stealing from a neighboring landowner. Michael Brown used the threat of physical violence to steal from a neighborhood shop owner.  If stealing is wrong, what's the difference between these two events?  If using the threat of violence to obtain something to which you are not legally entitled is wrong, then what's the difference?  Is it because Cliven Bundy's victim is almost universally despised: the Federal Government?  So would that make it OK for me to steal from someone you really dislike?

Cliven Bundy's supporters rallied to prevent the enforcement of a court order.  Michael Brown's supporters gathered to express outrage against the decision of a grand jury.  Both groups felt their cause was so just that they could ignore the rule of law and act outside the system of ordered liberty already available to us to fight for political causes, and that winning a political battle is more important than fighting that battle within established rules designed to prevent our political arguments from descending into violence.

Both groups ignored readily available court decisions written by objective third parties setting forth the essential facts of the cases, in favor of highly spun, politicized narratives which were largely based on private fantasy, available on their preferred television channels, radio talk shows, or online comment boards.  Both groups gave in to absurd leaps of logic: Cliven Bundy's statements that the Federal Government does not exist, and has no right to own land, such that only Clark County Nevada can charge him a grazing fee being accepted by his advocates at face value, when, in fact, if that were true, it would mean the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is void and he should be paying his grazing fees to Mexico, which is also owed a whole lot of back property taxes from the rest of us; Michael Brown's supporters walking around with their hands up in ridiculous "don't shoot I'm unarmed" poses that have nothing to do with anything that occurred that day.

Brown's supporters burned down local Ferguson businesses and hurt the economy of Brown's own home town.  Bundy's supporters repeatedly called early morning bomb threats into local Mesquite hotels (whose owners were adjudged guilty, French Revolution style, of insufficient devotion to the cause, by having allowed BLM agents to stay overnight), forcing them to evacuate their guests and causing economic harm to Bundy's own home town.

Media outlets have inflamed and agitated Brown supporters and caused violence, rioting and looting. Bundy called upon every wanna-be Timothy McVeigh in the country to come support his cause, and two of his guests were sufficiently agitated and inflamed to return home from Bunkerville and murder two police officers and a civilian.

In what universe is there any moral distinction between Brown and his Ferguson supporters, and Bundy and his Bunkerville supporters?  From where I'm sitting the only distinction seems to be based on skin-color, political affiliation, and whether you get your news from Fox or MSNBC/Comedy Central.

Question Three:

WHY CARE?

There are three paths a society can take: tending a bit too much towards anarchy, or tending a bit too much towards tyranny, or trying to stay on the proper Aristotelian median, and maintaining some semblance of ordered liberty. A society based on the right median road, maintaining ordered liberty, is the type of society most likely to produce a prosperous, happy, and self-sufficient people, capable of reaching their best potential and finding meaning in life.  It is also the most fragile form of society and government.

To be maintained, ordered liberty requires that a society's political players (which, in a democracy, is all of us) recognize, and adhere to, certain sound principles, transmitted to each new generation. These include: restrictions on the government's right to compel actions in violation of conscience; respect for the rule of law based on procedures and laws developed objectively and intended for universal application to various types of disputes; equality in legal treatment; the applicability of the law even to its creators and executors; separation of powers to create checks and balances upon governmental actions; free market economics; freedom of the press; and other similar principles.

When a society untethers itself from universal and objectively applicable principles, because its citizenry, judiciary, or other governing agents, come to believe that the ends justify the means as to certain political causes and battles, which are more important than maintaining political principles, the fragile system of ordered liberty quickly devolves and is replaced by a form of politics completely inconsistent with ordered liberty:  the politics of arbitrary and capriciously exercised power, leading to pervasive corruption and a cynical citizenry which no longer has any basis for patriotic loyalty to its society, but is instead dominated by individuals seeking to plunder the governmental commons for their own private interests.  The anarchy that follows leads to the rule of local militias and warlords in rural areas, and mob bossess and protection schemes in urban areas. You can see it in any third world country you may happen to visit: the gated and heavily guarded compounds of the few powerful and prosperous, with armed guards playing the same role developed by mercenary knights who guarded medieval moted castles, surrounded by the squalor of the peons.  The only answer to such anarchy is the eventual establishment of tyranny. Some countries get there quicker than others.  One of the signs that your society is walking along that road is when you find yourself perplexed by disparate treatment of and reactions to similar events, with no apparent basis in principle.

Some Thoughts on Religious Liberty. A Review of Lynne Cheney's James Madison, A Life Reconsidered, Part I

The first thing to know about James Madison, A Life Reconsidered, by Lynne Cheney (yes, that Lynne Cheney) is that it is very well written.  Cheney knows how to tell a good story, and the book is an engaging page turner.  The chapters on young Madison's involvement in organizing and securing the attendance of George Washington at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, his advocacy for the Virginia Plan at that convention, the writing of the Federalist Papers, the debate against Patrick Henry and Henry's fellow anti-federalists to secure Virginia's endorsement of the Constitution, and the enactment of the Bill of Rights, Madison's most important achievements, each in its own way absolutely fundamental to creating the nation in which we now live, are especially compelling. If Madison was not the father of our Constitution, he was certainly its midwife, and this book deserves to be widely read if for no other reason than to tell that remarkable story.

It is therefore incredibly frustrating that I cannot give the book my full endorsement and that I was so severely disappointed in certain aspects of Cheney's narrative.  My most significant concern is with Cheney's botched treatment of Madison on religious liberty, a subject on which she gets seriously sidetracked by a pet theory which leads her far, far, astray.  Religious liberty is a subject which could not be of greater importance, and on which we need a true account of Madison's views, now more than ever.  Cheney refuses to give us one.  

Madison's Contributions to the Cause of Religious Liberty

Madison should be seen as one of the great heroes of American history, not only due to his role in forming the union, but also for his great achievements in advancing the cause of religious liberty and freedom of conscience.  His primary contributions to that cause are fourfold, each of monumental and hopefully enduring significance: 

1.  First, as a young, new, and still obscure member of the Virginia legislature which found itself in need of creating a new form of state government in the wake of the colonies' declaring of independence, Madison got himself appointed to George Mason's committee for establishing a Declaration of Rights and a Constitution for Virginia.  Mason wrote an article on religious freedom for the Declaration which was based on Locke's wording, about as far as the ball had been taken up until that time: "all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate."  But Madison was ready to advance the cause further than Locke.  Showing his political savvy, he worked through other, older and more prominent committee members, to obtain a rewording of the section into a statement that went beyond mere "tolerance" for minority or dissenting religous opinions: "all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion."  Equal freedom to exercise one's religion would now be recognized as a civil right in the largest and most influential of the 13 original colonies.

2.  Madison's second great contribution to the cause of religious freedom was his successful fight against a Virginia bill which would impose governmental taxes for the support of Christian churches. Having served my mission in a country where the two official religions were supported by church taxes administered and collected by the state, and your religion was considered a mere "association" (not a church) if its members tithed themselves voluntarily, I'm especially appreciative of this principle. Madison waged this particular fight through his anonymous authorship of the "Memorial and Remonstrances Against Religious Assessments" which killed public support for the bill.  The Memorial and Remonstrances is a remarkable document, which deserves to be far more widely read and remembered today than it is, setting forth, as it does, both the best possible theological arguments of a believing Christian, and the most compelling secular and political arguments of a gifted lawyer, for its assertions.  The document ought to be especially appreciated by Latter-day Saints, for its argument that Christianity existed in its purest form before it was corrupted by integration with the organs of the state, in passages which might have been written by an early Mormon Apostle explaining the apostasy and need for a restoration, and which one can imagine having been a familiar passage among early converts to the LDS faith:

"[E]xperience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishment [i.e., establishments of religion, 18th Centuryese for official state churches], instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries [i.e., since the 3rd Century official incorporation of Christianity into Constantine's Roman Empire] has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect, point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy."

3.  Madison's third important contribution was utilizing his increasing political savvy and influence, as well as the political momentum generated by the Memorial and Remonstrances, to shepherd into law the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson, his life-long mentor. Madison was so enthusiastic about this victory that he wrote Jefferson exulting that he flattered himself that he and Jefferson had "in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind." Clearly, Madison, for all his foresight, could not predict 20th Century liberalism and political correctness.  Still, his vision proved true for many years to come, and has only in recent decades begun to crack under the weight of modern liberal puritanism and intolerance for dissent.  

4.  Finally, Madison was the chief advocate in the first Congress for passage of a Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, whose final language was not quite as powerful as it could have been (had we stuck with Madison's original proposed language) but has, nevertheless, protected us against offical state religions (via the establishment clause) and against prohibitions on our freedom of religious exercise (through the free exercise clause) ever since.  

Ironically, in light of the ultimate importance of the Bill of Rights in modern American life, Madison's views on the subject were ambivalent.  He felt, initially, that a bill of rights was unnecessary. The federal government was supposed to be a government of enumerated powers in any event, and thus could not pass laws on subjects (such as gun ownership or religious establishments) beyond the scope of those limited powers which had been delegated to it, if such laws would infringe on areas which were left to the State governments of general jurisdiction.  Not only was a bill of rights therefore redundant, but such a list might confuse and dilute Americans' understanding of these systemic Constitutional workings and the protections they were designed to afford (as, indeed, some modern scholars argue has taken place). Nevertheless, upon realizing that the lack of a bill of rights was the most effective argument the anti-federalists were using to agitate for a second constitutional convention, where they could reject the Constitution outright and stymie the creation of another such document, Madison eventually reconciled himself to the idea, if primarily for political purposes, even coming to believe that a listing of such rights would have the salutary effect of making them well known to future generations of Americans who would thereby be more likely to jealously safeguard them, a truth which, as Cheney argues, could be attested by millions of future children, introduced to the Bill of Rights on their elementary school classroom bulletin boards. And so it was that, primarily with Madison's nudging and prodding and drafting and exhorting, the First Congress took time from other matters most of its members felt to be more important, to formulate the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution, and provide us with the Bill of Rights, which would prevent a second constitutional convention from ever being held, preserve the continuing support of the States whose ratification of the Constitution had been conditioned on the inclusion of such a listing, and thus save the Constitution from an early demise.  With the passage of the 14th Amendment, the Bill of Rights was no longer a mere instrument of federalism, delineating the boundaries of the federal government's law-making powers, but became a protection for all Americans against any encroachments of their rights by both national and local governmental entities, including, under the First Amendment, the right to freedom of religious exercise, and freedom from official state or national churches.    

Cheney's Epileptic Theory

Cheney has developed a theory on what motivated Madison's devotion to the cause of religious liberty, and it goes like this: (1) Madison suffered from occasional debilitating symptoms which he (rightly, and ahead of the science of his time) recognized as symptomatic of an affliction which was likely related to epilepsy, and perhaps a form of epilepsy, a view which modern science confirms.  (2) The Christian dogma of Madison's day treated epilepsy as a sign of spiritual uncleanliness, related to the stories of demon possessions in the New Testament.  (3)  Madison would have been familiar with this Christian dogma and would have been deeply troubled by the same, and would have grown to resent it. (4) Therefore, Madison would have been motivated to oppose political support for religious dogma, as a result of his bitterness over the religious views of his day on this subject.  "Madison's zeal" Cheney writes, in the cause of "religious freedom--which both [he and Jefferson] saw as part and parcel of intellectual freedom" was "likely heightened by the misery he knew as a young man when he realizedthat Christian orthodoxy insisted on a supernatural explanation for epilepsy." (p. 72).

Cheney makes a fairly sound case for the first element of her theory, and I can accept it.  Point two seems fairly strongly supported as well, although it is a perilous thing for a 21st Century author to try to understand the religious sentiments of bygone eras, and she may be on more shaky ground here.  I find for example that when outsiders write about my faith, even those who are writing in a manner which is friendly or neutral, something nuanced often gets lost in translation, which I am sure is true of my own understanding of other religions as well.  The words are correct, but the emphasis is off, the focus misunderstood.  It's possible that something like that is happening here.  Cheney's portrayal of the official biblical exegesis of the day may be accurate, but how often did people actually talk about this stuff at the time? And how did the Christians of the day treat epilepsy among their own families and flocks?  This is harder to know, and Cheney may or may not be accurately explaining the true underlying views of the day.  

The third and fourth elements of the Cheney theory seemed to this reader to be extremely tenuous, and ultimately unsupported. Had Madison read all of the various statements of various classical and Christian authors on epilepsy which Cheney has found and quoted?  Who knows?  Was he troubled by them?  Perhaps.  But if so, he doesn't seem to have left any record of such concerns in letters or other writings, at least not that Cheney quotes (and, presumably, if the record was there, she would have drawn on it for support).  Did these concerns lead to a distrust of dogma and a belief in religious freedom of thought?  Again, if so, that process (much less the connection between that process and Madison's epilepsy) does not seem to be documented anywhere, other than in Cheney's speculations. Cheney assures her readers that Madison departed from orthodox beliefs in 1773 and 1774 (pp. 39-40), but her evidence for this claim is not based on any of Madison's writings (indeed, she states, he would not have "publicly" made an "issue" of his altered thinking--pp. 41-42-- which begs the question, how does she know to what extent his thinking had altered?)  Instead, Madison's unorthodoxy is said to be demonstrated by his increasing hostility during this time period to the privileges afforded the official state church of Virginia, and its treatment of minority religious groups such as the baptists.  These were, however, political positions, regarding the authority of organs of State government, which say nothing of Madison's private religious or doctrinal views, let alone how those private views were affected by official church dogma regarding epilepsy.   

In the end Cheney's theory is interesting, but not all that convincing.  Indeed, it's easy to speculate that what's really going on here has more to do with Cheney's life and resultant interests than Madison's.  Given Cheney's age and the majority attitudes of her generation during her younger years, and given her family's prominence in the more conservative of America's two political parties, it is not hard to imagine Lynne Cheney having held, for most of her life, fairly orthodox and traditional views on homosexuality, which she likely later grappled with, and to some extent, or perhaps fully, rejected, upon one of her daughters announcing her homosexuality and seeking out a same sex marriage.  It is not hard to imagine that Cheney's intellectual struggles in that regard may have been extremely similar to those which she now ascribes to and imagines for Madison, as he allegedly grappled with  the subject of Christian doctrine concerning epilepsy.  Her theory may therefore be more about projection than history.  

But now I'm engaging in unsupported speculation.

Whatever the reason for Cheney's development of this theory, and however well or poorly supported her reasoning, my main concern with the theory is its unfortunate and distorting effect on how Cheney tells the story of Madison's contributions to the actual tenets of religious liberty.  By assuming that Madison was motivated by his own bitterness over Christian dogma, Cheney gives us an anti-religious Madison, crusading for his cause based on hostility to religious belief, instead of the true Madison, upset by religious persecution.  This telling of the story, in turn, prevents Cheney from ever fully analyzing and appreciating both sides of the coin of religious freedom which was minted through Madison's efforts. 

The Two Great Pillars of Madisonian Religious Liberty 

There are two important principles of religious liberty referenced throughout Madison's writings and ultimately enshrined in the First Amendment: 

(1) First, the establishment clause principle: which is that the government should not officially recognize or endorse any religious institution or church as the official religion of the state (i.e., should not create what 18th Century Americans referred to as an Establishment of Religion, and what we today would call an Official State Church), but must be neutral towards the competing claims of differing religious sects.  This vital principle of religious liberty is most frequently referenced today under Jefferson's shorthand phrase: "separation of church and state." 

(A brief digression: some now argue this principle was provided to give us freedom from religion, rather than freedom from officially state endorsed religion, by requiring not only governmental neutrality among different religions, but between religion and irreligion.  One of the best and most concise historical arguments against this overzealous understanding of the establishment clause may be found by reading Justice Rehnquist's dissenting opinion in the school prayer case of Wallace v. Jaffree, the entire text of which decision, including Rehnquist's dissent, can be found here:  http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=472&invol=38  It must however be recognized that, while compelling, Rehnquist's argument is provided in a dissent, which tells us where we are today.) 

(2) Second, the free exercise principle, pursuant to which the freedom to exercise one's religious beliefs was established and enshrined in our First Amendment, which freedom encompasses not merely the freedom to worship or to privately hold religious beliefs, but to exercise, or act upon, the same, without being unduly constrained by governmental fiat.  

In Cheney's telling, the first of these important principles is misconstrued, and the second is simply ignored, with Cheney's version of Madison coming across as a man far more concerned with freedom from religion than freedom for religious exercise, a distortion on both counts.  With respect to the establishment principle, it is true that Madison was deeply opposed to establishments of religion, fighting against the privileges enjoyed by Virginia's official church, and to ensure that no national church would be established.  But nothing he wrote for the cause of religious liberty suggests any hostility to private churches and religious institutions. With respect to the free exercise principle, Cheney's telling, necessarily, omits Madison's maintenance of the right to exercise one's religion free from constraint.  An uninformed reader of Cheney's tome would easily assume that Madison cared solely about freeing citizens from religious influence, and not a whit for protecting citizens' rights to freely exercise their faith.  

But the real Madison cared just as deeply for the right of a citizen to exercise his religious beliefs as he did for disestablishing official state churches, as proven in the record of Madison's actual words, set forth within his actual achievements.  For example, his preferred language in the Virginia Declaration of Rights retained the language concerning "free exercise" of faith.  The Memorial and Remonstrances against Religious Assessments included a passage describing the exercise of religion as not only a right but also a duty, and not only a duty, but a duty which took precedent over the duties one owed to the state, and which, until exercised, even prevented full acceptance into civil society:  "It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the General Authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign."  This is hardly the statement of a latter-day atheist, concerned with protecting the citizenry from any religious influences, in favor of allegiance to the secular State.  The line about saving one's precedent allegiance to God is especially salient to certain modern controversies: Madison would likely have approved of the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance.  (Whether he would have approved of the pledge at all is a different question, and would depend on whether you were talking to Madison in the 1780s or the 1790s, but that's a subject for part 2 of this post.)

Madison's letter to Jefferson describing the passage of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty included the observation that it was supported by "a general convention of the Presbyterian Church" which had "prayed expressly that the bill . . . might be passed into a law, as the best safeguard short of a Constitutional one, for their religious rights." Again, this enthusiastic observation would not have been made by a man whose actions were motivated by anti-religious sentiment.  Finally, there is Madison's first proposed draft of what became the First Amendment, ultimately diluted by his colleagues, but which would have afforded even clearer protections for the faithful against governmental encroachment than what the final draft afforded: "The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed."  I can think of a number of recent State and Federal Court decisions upholding statutory infringements on religious exercise, which would have been decided differently had Madison's original language, protecting against such infringements "on any pretext" been both preserved and also followed.

Clearly, Madison was just as concerned with protecting religious freedom, including freedom of action, exercise and worship, as he was in preventing the establishment of a national church, and there is simply no evidence that his distaste for offically established religious institutions was based on any particular dislike of private religions or their doctrines.  It is truly tragic that Cheney's book, likely to be read for some time as the currently definitive single volume work on Madison's life, fails to get that part of the story right.  This tragedy is especially acute given the tenor of our times, which increasingly regards the establishment clause as a tool for the overzealous expulsion of religious sentiment from the public square, under the pretext of historically inaccurate and overly broad readings thereof, while at the same time ignoring the free exercise clause altogether.  These trends are shown by the recent need to shore up free exercise rights through legislation such as federal and state religious freedom restoration acts, designed to overcome court precedents which have allowed the free exercise clause to be ignored "on any pretext" available. This trend is also demonstrated by the recent backlash against those very RFRA laws, as in the liberal media's shallow and misleading excoriation of the Hobby Lobby decision applying the federal RFRA to Obamacare's abortifacient mandates, and the backlash against an Arizona bill which would have strengthened that State's RFRA statute.  Cheney's book could have helped to overcome these dangerous trends of our time, which bode ill for the religious liberty which Madison did so much to affirm and preserve.  Instead, Cheney's book may end up contributing to these modern misunderstandings and to the erosions of the Madisonian liberties which will inevitably follow.         

{For Part II of this Book Review, on Madison's shifting federalist and anti-federalist loyalties, see here: http://dadsbookreviews.blogspot.com/2015/01/james-madison-federalist-and-republican.html}

Elections 2014

So I've marked up my sample ballot and here's how I'm voting on those races for which I'm willing to publicly share my opinion and would rather not take any more phone calls.  I'm a conservative republican so most of these choices won't surprise anyone.  These are my own individual opinions and are not representative of any other group or entity with which I am affiliated:

Question 1: YES.  We need an intermediate appellate court in Nevada.
Question 2: YES.   I'm not generally pro-tax.  But Nevadans can only get the benefit of our State's indigenous mineral resources once, when they are pulled from the ground, often by foreign firms who ship them elsewhere to be sold.  It would be nice if it rained here and we had agricultural crops that could be harvested year after year, but there you go.  Mines shouldn't have any special protection against taxation.  Once those resources, the natural inheritance of all Nevadans, are harvested, Nevada's public can't ever benefit from them again.  
Question 3: NO.  NO NO NO NO NO.  They want to tax a business's revenues?  Regardless of whether it made any profits?   Who are these people?  Apparently they don't include any one who owns a business, is employed by a business, or buys any products or services from a business.  Give me a break.

Congressional Representative District 4.  Really not thrilled with my choices here.  How did I get gerrymandered into this district?  I guess I'm just indirectly voting for which party's member I want to hold the gavel as speaker of the house.

Governor: Sandoval  We are extremely lucky in our Governor at the moment.  An extremely intelligent and competent person who is also very good at winning elections.  Not a combination you see every day.
Lieutenant Governor: Hutchison I did some volunteer citizen lobbying on an educational issue in the last legislative session (which I'm still not quite sure how I ended up getting involved with) and I was extremely impressed at the Senate Republican Caucus Hutchison hosted for our group and the questions he asked and his grasp of the issues.  Should he end up becoming Governor because Sandoval leaves office to run against Harry Reid (which presumably won't happen if Flores defeats Hutchison) the State would be in excellent and competent hands.  

Attorney General: Adam Paul Laxalt.  I liked Governor Miller.  But his son seems to have fallen pretty far from the tree.  All those perqs of office he's enjoying aren't going to mean people looking for payback?  Criticizing his opponent's military service?  Really?  Laxalt spoke at a CLE I attended and wasn't shy about standing up for his values, which I share.  I like him.  One of the good guys.

State Assemby District 37: Wesley Duncan.  Our State's legislature did some crazy things two years ago, and came very close to doing some other crazy things.  It's important to put the senate and the assembly and all their committee chairs in the right hands this year or all of our wallets and all of our childrens' minds are at risk.

DA: Wolfson.  I doubt I would vote for Wolfson for any legislative office, given his liberal politics. But, having once argued a case before an administrative law board he was chairing, I found him to be a very fair and intelligent person, and the people I know who work for the DA's office and whose judgment I trust all seem to support him.

Sheriff: Burns.  We have a good police force in Las Vegas, and we don't seem to have ever been troubled by some of the pervasive corruption which has cropped up in other cities' police departments from time to time. So I trust and respect the judgment of our local officers and police department employees, and every single one of them who I talk to supports Burns.  He was also their overwhelming choice (not even by a close margin) when they voted on who they would endorse. That speaks volumes, since they presumably know the two candidates better than any one.  I also went to an open house for Burns which I was invited to by a police officer friend of mine, and I was favorably impressed with Burns' experience, especially in his successful efforts in reaching out to improve police relationships with locals in minority neighborhoods.

Judicial Races
Department 2: Scotti (on the advice of others I trust)
Department 3: Herndon
Department 20:  Tao
Department 22: Johnson (really one of our better Judges, who runs her courtroom the way it should be run and who rules based on facts and law not emotion or bias).
Department 24: Hardy
Department 30: Wiese
Department 32: Bare

There are a lot of judges who I've never appeared in front of because they have criminal or family law dockets or because I've just never happened to draw them. If I don't have an opinion I'll typically look for some reputable source of endorsements.  The RJ's endorsements can sometimes be just completely wrong, but they get it right more often than not.  The newspaper does a good job in conducting the attorney survey on which judges should be retained, and they tend to put a lot of stock in that survey in their endorsements, so it's as good a place to start as any:

http://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/2014-review-journal-endorsements

How to Destroy a Nation

If I were President of the United States, and I was determined to destroy this Nation, here's what I would do: 

1.  First, destroy the economy, and wage relentless war on jobs:  I would accomplish this in a few easy steps: (i)  I would pass laws (with respect to healthcare, for example, but any other major sector of the economy would do) that made it so onerous for employers to hire new employees, that everyone in America became a part time employee because no employer wanted to hire anyone on a full time basis anymore.  Soon, everyone would be working three part time jobs, one job to pay part of the bills, a second job to make up for the fact that your first job isn't full time, and, finally, a third job to pay for things like health insurance that would have been provided by your first job if it were a full time job, which it isn't, because those don't exist any more.  (ii) I would then import millions of unskilled workers from third-world countries who would, by virtue of the simplest and most inelectuble law of economics, supply and demand, drive entry level wages down so far that young Americans would be unable to find work and begin building work experience.  This would be especially harmful to minorities who have already lived in America for generations and who are most in need of entry level work in their youth.  Nevertheless, I would decry as racist anyone who disagreed with my policies, ignoring those who put me into office and are being most severely harmed by my policies.  (iii) Finally, if new technologies emerged which threatened to strengthen the economy, I would choke them off.  Fracking threatening to turn us into an exporter of oil and reduce our dependence on oil from parts of the world that hate our guts?  Block it, sue it, regulate it, kill it.  And if that doesn't work, prevent the construction of any new refineries which can turn the oil into its usable form.  Force people to use organic, grown fuels instead, from land that used to grow food to eat, so our society can choose between starving and driving.  Enormous oil discoveries in Canada can bring us cheap oil from a friendly nation instead of expensive oil from the other side of the world, controlled by people who want to wage Jihad against us?  No way! That's not going to help me destroy America.  No XL Pipleline for you, Mr. American hoping for a job or a cheap gallon of gas. Kill it, regulate it, sue it, block it.  

2.  Next, destroy the American family, and wage relentless war on fathers.  If I were the President of a nation which I so despised that I felt it was in need of fundamental transformation, and therefore wanted to destroy that country as it had heretofore existed in its untransformed state, I would ignore what numerous studies have shown about the importance of fathers in the home, and the statistical and scientific evidence of how much better both girls and boys do in adolescence and throughout their adult life if they are raised by their own married mother and father, who were married before the child was born and remain married until the child reaches adulthood.  Despite those scientific truths, I would promote a new definition of family which had the effect of proclaiming that children do not need both a mother and a father, and, would, indeed, make it socially unacceptable, bigoted and reprehensible, to advocate for the importance of fathers in the lives of children, so that young men can be taught there is no need to curb their sexual appetites within the confines of a committed marital relationship, or be responsible for their sperm donor babies, whether the sperm was donated at the clinic or in person.  This will have the inevitable effect of strengthening the hand of government, as the proliferation of single parent homes inexorably leads the government to play a greater role in the lives of the citizens formed in broken families, with government stepping in to act as disciplinarian (through the police and the courts) of sons not raised with a father (many times more likely to end up in juvenile court than sons with fathers), and as bread provider (through welfare services) to teenaged mothers (many times more likely to become teenaged mothers than are young women raised in a home with a father) who find they are unable to both raise their newborns and provide for them in the marketplace.  This strengthening of State power will inevitably lead to a destruction of the small government foundational doctrines upon which the Country was built.

3.  Then, attack the Constitution. Then I could strengthen the power of the State, and weaken the power of the citizen, in more direct ways, and at the same time remove the biggest hindrances (the Constitution, liberty) to my nation-destroying objectives.  I would for example install on the Supreme Court a Justice (Sotomayor) so radical that she believes the United States Constitution says exactly the opposite of what it says.  As demonstrated by her dissent in Schuette, Sotomayor not only believes it is perfectly appropriate for States to ignore the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal protection, such that they are allowed to ignore that Constitution's equal protection provisions and provide preferences which discriminate against certain racial and ethnic groups and prefer others in public university admissions and public contract bidding, but she also believes that States are REQUIRED to violate the 14th Amendment, even when they decide they don't want to do so, and are REQUIRED to discriminate against some of their citizens and prefer others and may not democratically decide to stop doing so by a voter-enacted amendment! Thus, in one fell swoop, Justice Sotomayor would (a) abolish democracy, (b) rewrite the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause to say exactly the opposite of what it says, and (c) create an America in which individuals are not treated as individuals, equal before the law and judged on their own merits, but as members of racial composite groups who are encouraged by law to compete with one another for racial spoils (a truly wonderful recipe for ethnic harmony and cohesion).  If I wanted to destroy this Country, Justice Sotomayor is exactly the type of person I would want to intall on the high court.

I would then encourage my party's senate and judicial committee members to wage an assault, unprecedented in all of U.S. history, on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, such as the assault currently being levied by the Democrats against the First Amendment in the form of S.J. Res 19, also known as the Udall Amendment.  This proposed constitutional amendment, to which all of the democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to their everlasting shame, gave their assent, would give to congress the power to restrict any speech engaged in by any corporation or any individual which is politically motivated.  It would in other words repeal the First Amendment.  And no, that's not overheated rhetoric, that's my reading, as a lawyer, of the text of what this proposed Constitutional law expressly indicates it would do.  S.J. Res 19 explicitly and expressly indicates, in section 3 thereof, that there is only one of the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment which is not to be repealed thereby, in that the Amendment is not to be construed "to grant Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the press."   So the other four rights enjoyed by Americans for the past 200 plus years are all fair game: Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government for redress?  Bye bye.  This is such a blatantly bad idea that even the ACLU has argued against it.  But don't worry, Ted Cruz is against it too, so all the cool kids on Kos and the Huffington Post are ignoring the ACLU and making fun of him and fully supporting this monstrosity, because that's how sheep decide their politics, not on the basis of independent critical thought, but on the basis of lining up with their teammates to be "for" whatever the other side is "against."  Barack Obama said he wanted to transform America.  Well, destroying the First Amendment would certainly be the best place to start. It's a lot easier to transform a nation when you make it impossible to criticize the leaders.  Just ask the Russians, that's how they did it in Eastern Europe.  

4.  Finally, weaken the military. If I were a President who wanted to destroy this country, I would, against the advice of all of my military and intelligence advisors, remove troops from areas of the world where they had just won a war, so as to allow those areas of the world to fall prey to new aggressions at the hands of terrorist militias.  If even members of my own party, such as the highly reputable Leon Panetta, told me this was asinine and insane, I would kick them to the curb, pull out the troops, and go golfing.  And then I would ignore briefings on the rise of insurgents who were undermining what American money and blood had accomplished, until the rise of ISIS like fanaticals forced me to engage in a military response which could have been avoided had I just maintained the course to begin with.  (Look, I get that alot of Americans on both sides of the aisle were skeptical of the war in Iraq.  But just because of the many people who were disappointed that the surge worked, did that really mean we had to deliberately unwind a victory once obtained? Have we stayed too long in Germany and Japan and could they start building their own military now and let us save our money and go home and stop subsidizing their protection? Yes.  But that doesn't mean it would have been a good idea to leave two weeks after WWII was over and hand those countries back over to Nazis and Military Imperialist groups who were still eager for victory.  That would have been insane, or the work of someone who actually hated America and wanted to see her disgraced.)

It would be almost comforting to believe that Barack Obama was some sort of evil aberration forced upon America by conspiring outsiders, like in the Manchurian Candidate.  But the truth, I am afraid, is much more frightening.  Barack Obama actually believes his course would be better for America than the pro-American course engaged in by almost every single one of his predecessors (excluding Jimmy Carter).  And enough voters agreed, or were simply too simple-minded to know better, that they voted him into office.  How did we reach such a point in our nation's history?  Part of it is our education system, hijacked by left wing ideologues who have no desire to teach patriotic or uplifting history to our children, or help them understand the U.S. Constitution or the free market system.  Part of it is an ahistorical influx of more immigrants, over a shorter period of time, than have ever arrived here before, many of whom came to America because of its prosperity, but came from cultures which made it all but impossible for them to understand the principles and systems which account for that prosperity, such that they end up voting for the same kind of politicians whose policies led their home countries to be such miserable places (which immigrants are certainly not going to be taught more accurate principles by any of the dominant thinking in our current education systems or news or entertainment media).  And part of the problem is prosperity itself.  Who has time to read history, think critically, understand what has historically distinguished this country and allowed us to buck the tide of international opinion, avoiding monarchy in the 19th century and totalitarianism in the 20th, when there's so many fun things to watch on Netflix and so many fun vacations to go on, and good music to listen to on our iPods?  Whatever the sources of our national stupidity, the road it has put us on is not leading us to a happy end.  

The Disingenuous Sophistries of the New Mormon Dissidents

The Gift of Faith

Like all believers, I have occasionally had doubts, about the existence of God, or the teachings of my own religion.  But they’ve never been too difficult to overcome, and I’ve never spent much time wallowing in them.  Truth be told, I’ve never had a really serious intellectual or spiritual crisis of faith.  I don’t share this to brag or out of pride, but out of gratitude.  We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and the weaknesses I have been given to make this mortal sojourn a time of learning and growth are more than sufficient for the task, thank you very much.  Nor do I believe that easy faith is a strength, let alone a virtue.  But I do believe that it is a gift, a manifestation of grace.  The gift of faith is a wonderful thing, for many reasons.

For one thing, the most fascinating questions, leading to the most satisfying insights, are the questions that you get to ask as a believer.  When you know that certain precepts are true, and then seek to understand their application, or when you wrestle with reconciling the paradoxes of seemingly contradictory scriptural directives (let your light so shine, but do not your alms to be seen of men) and try to determine how and to what extent each may apply and clarify the other, you can, I believe, be presented with opportunities for growth that are denied those who live their lives on the periphery, forever investigating the much less interesting “is this true?” question, rather than eventually moving past all that to cut to the chase and get to the good stuff.  Why spend an excessive amount of time trying to determine the plausibility of any particular geographical setting for the Book of Mormon over another, or trying to precisely ascertain the nature of the divine process involved in Joseph Smith’s deriving the text of the Book of Abraham, when the Holy Spirit has told me what I need to know: the scriptures are true, such that I get to involve myself in far more intriguing areas of inquiry.  I can instead enjoy spending time in 2 Nephi Chapter 2, trying to understand its deep and significant theological statements, or pondering on and trying to comprehend Alma 5, or Alma 7, or Alma 34, or Moroni 10, or being refocused on the paradigms offered by the Pearl of Great Price, the Sermon on the Mount and Christ’s final statements on the cross.  Critics and murmurers and antis and political advocates and narcissistic podcast hosts?  Whose got the time?

Inoculations

And so, when I remark upon the ease with which I have come to accept the truths of the restored gospel (despite my persistent difficulties in trying to consistently live it), I do so not from pride, but out of gratitude, including a deeply felt gratitude for God’s little interventions and tender mercies.  As I look back on my life, I find that I have often been sheltered from doubt and struggles of faith, by virtue of what I would call prior inoculations, which have kept me from being tripped up by some of the stumbling blocks and sophistries to which I’ve sometimes seen others fall prey.  These inoculations have prevented me from becoming overly concerned with some of the common criticisms of faith in general, or my Church in particular. These typically come in the form of a forewarning, or prediction, of some danger on the road ahead, which, when the danger arises, keeps me safe, because of the faith generated from the very fact of having been forewarned.

By way of illustration, when I was in my late teens, I read C.S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters.  At the time, many of the issues addressed in the book were beyond the scope of my experience, and it did not initially become, as it later would, one of the most important world-view-defining texts of my life.  Nevertheless, there were a few things that stood out to me and which I later remembered.  One of them, for whatever reason, was Lewis’s description and prediction (in Chapter 23) of how Satan would rely on skeptic-scholars to give each future generation a new iteration of “the historical Jesus.”  These would be forthcoming, Lewis’s senior devil, Screwtape, explained, on a regular and recurring basis, on into the future, with each new version to be based on suppressing certain scriptures and historical evidence, and over-exaggerating other data, to arrive at the precise “historical Jesus” custom designed to do the most harm to each particular generation’s faith, based on the vogues and concerns of their own time.

At some point later in my life, I found myself reading a magazine article, I believe in the Atlantic, or perhaps Harpers or somewhere else, about the latest views on the subject of the historical Jesus. I remember I had a hard time taking the theories set forth in the article very seriously, given that so many of them, in premise and effect, conformed so perfectly to C.S. Lewis’s predictions.  If I recall correctly, I was especially bemused at how the adjectives used in the article to describe a particular scholar’s theories were updated synonymous variations on Screwtape’s recommended term for the WWII generation: “brilliant.”  But then, Screwtape had mentioned that the adjective would change. The article was unable to move me from my faith in the basic narrative of the Gospels because  I had been inoculated.[Endnote 1]  Lewis’s wisdom in being able to predict a phenomenon I later saw occurring, many years after his death, made me trust his wisdom more than that of those who seemed to be following the script he had so aptly described and predicted beforehand.

Of course, the best source of inoculation is to be steeped in the scriptures. I came across a Salt Lake Tribune article recently about the history of societal and religious attitudes towards marriage.  The central expert quoted in the piece argued that, while Jesus did not necessarily condone adultery and divorce, he wasn’t overly concerned about them.  This argument could only be made by someone completely unfamiliar with any of the many statements Christ makes on these subjects in the Gospels (including in Christianity’s most basic text, the Sermon on the Mount), such as Christ’s call for the restoration of an ancient prohibition against no-fault unilateral divorce, which prohibition Moses had “suffered” to be set aside, due to the hardness of the Israelites’ hearts, as well as passages which broaden the definition of what is prohibited as a form of adultery, to encompass the thoughts of our hearts.  This so-called expert’s willingness to state an opinion on a subject which he clearly had never studied, made me realize that I didn’t need to take anything he said with the slightest degree of seriousness.

But the most important inoculations we receive from the scriptures work at a spiritual, not an intellectual, level.  If, at some point in your youth, you had the experience of reading about Lehi’s dream and having the spirit work within you such that you just knew exactly what the great and spacious building and the mocking people therein were all about, and you just understood in ways that can never be articulated, the truth of that symbol, then you will know quite clearly what I am talking about.  You were inoculated, and you can probably remember specific moments in your life when the strength and power of your understanding of that symbol protected you from veering onto a particular path.

President Cracroft

The most important series of inoculations against the arguments and sophistries of skeptics and critics which I ever received came during my mission, and were provided by one of my most important spiritual mentors, my Mission President, Richard H. Cracroft.  The Prez, as we called him[2] was a truly remarkable man.  The major inoculation Prez gave me was in teaching me an important truth, not by telling me this truth, but by living it: It is possible to be a Mormon liberal intellectual, and remain true to the faith.

I did not become an intellectual.  I also did not become a liberal.  But I needed to know this truth nonetheless, and I am glad President Cracroft taught it to me.  It inoculated me against the claim I’ve sometimes heard from murmuring Latter-day Saints that if you are just too smart, or just too socially aware, in comparison to your fellow Mormons, your exit from the Church must be excused.  Sorry, not buying it.  Especially from self-described intellectuals who aren’t nearly as bright as der Prez was, but think that, unlike him, they’re too smart for the Church.  It is pride, not brains, not politics, not social views, that puts one on the high road to apostasy.  Always has been.  Always will be.  Now that I think of it, I got this inoculation from Prez as well, who talked to me once about what he called “the people of the higher plane” those who say, “I’m sorry dear Priesthood leader, you are a good (read simple) man, but you have to understand, I’m just on a higher plane.”  Whether that supposed higher plane is intellectual, spiritual, political, or social, and whether it stems from overzealous and overly dogmatic right wing orthodox conservative views, or from a secular liberal humanist point of view, it always turns out to be a high road to thinking we know better than the current leaders of the Church, which, in turn, is the high road to apostasy.

(For those who did not have the privilege of knowing Prez, but who would like to learn this same truth about the ability to be true to the Mormon faith even as a liberal intellectual, I would suggest reading Boyd Jay Petersen’s excellent biography, Hugh Nibley, A Consecrated Life, about beloved Mormon Scholar and ardent liberal Hugh Nibley.  Added bonus: Petersen’s book is just fun reading.)[3]

Prez Cracroft had the credentials that allow one to be called a scholar and an intellectual: the Ph.D., the publications in scholarly journals, the jobs as a university professor and dean, etc.  But most people who came to understand his keen mental gifts did so in the privileged context of being exposed to his amazing sense of humor, always used to edify and bring joy into the room, never to skewer (unless in self-deprecation).  You can get a small sense of what I’m talking about in this tribute I found to him:

http://bycommonconsent.com/2012/09/25/richard-cracroft-go-gentle/

Prez was also one of the best writers I’ve ever read, with a truly distinctive voice.  Here’s a little gem that gives a small taste of this:

        http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=2841 . [4]

President Cracroft believed in intellectual integrity.  During a mission tour in which he and his AP’s listened to missionaries role-playing teaching the discussions, he learned that some of the missionaries were using a bit of inaccurate folk-apologetics to explain the reasons for polygamy, if they were asked about the subject by investigators.  He would have none of it.  He taught the missionaries the correct historical information about the reasons given and understood at the time for the revelations on polygamy, and how it was seen in the Church while it was practiced, and explained better and more accurate ways of discussing the issue and resolving concerns.

I had the opportunity, during the first year of my mission, to be assigned as an office Elder, working with President Cracroft’s older sister, Helen, who came to the mission with her husband to handle administrative matters, and with whom I felt a special kinship, because she found the same people vexing or annoying, for the same reasons, as I did.[5]  During this time, I recall driving Prez around to various errands or conferences, and listening to him discuss Joseph Smith and the history of the Church with his wife, sister Helen, and her husband, in a dispassionate, objective, and scholarly manner that was a bit startling for someone like me, who wasn’t used to hearing people talk like this.  He would, for example, elaborate on the different accounts Joseph Smith provided of the First Vision, and the obvious influences that affected these different write-ups of the experience, explaining on one occasion that the Prophet Joseph had not quite gotten past Presbyterian influences when he wrote his first account, which was written in a very Presbyterian voice, and addressed very Presbyterian concerns.  President’s take was that the Prophet had not himself understood the full import and significance of the experience, until he, like all of us, grew in his own understanding, line upon line.  When Prez would then stand up in a Zone Conference and give the most powerful testimony of Joseph Smith I’d ever heard, I came to realize that his deep and sophisticated, scholarly and objective, understanding of the Prophet Joseph’s life and the history of the Church was not a stumbling block to his testimony, but was, quite to the contrary, its source.  (Indeed, he loved to tell the story of a bet he had made with a colleague that Hoffman’s so-called Salamander letter would someday be found to be a forgery, since Prez couldn’t put its implications into his mental file of the Prophet Joseph’s life and thinking.  His colleague smiled condescendingly at Prez’s supposed naivete at the time, but Prez won the bet.)

I did not speak much to Prez about his politics, or overhear him say much about it, but when I did it was clear that, like most college professors, including Nibley, he did not share most Mormons’ (including my own) conservative political leanings.  However, unlike some of today’s more strident LDS dissenters, who believe themselves “compelled” by their intellectual skepticism and political liberalism to attack the Church and its leaders, Prez was true blue and dyed in the wool.  If there was an academic controversy that involved Church principles, Prez defended the Church’s principles, as in this piece, in which testimony is borne to worldly scholars:

http://mldb.byu.edu/attune.htm

Likewise, if a Cracroft piece appeared in a publication that good Mormons, for good reason, ought not  to read without a helping heaping of grains of salt nearby, such as Sunstone, Prez’s contribution would be refreshingly faith affirming, notwithstanding that magazine’s usual fare, like a rose springing up from the fetid manure surrounding it:

  https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/084-23-27.pdf

“From those who will claim to be our friends”

I’ve been thinking a lot about President Cracroft lately, as events in the news have reminded me of the final inoculation I received from him, in the form of counsel he gave my flight group, on our last night in Switzerland.[6]  Der Prez, among other issues, discussed with us a concern that had been on his mind, from his perch in the world of academia, about the changing nature of those who would criticize the Church.  The anti-Mormonism we’d been exposed to as missionaries was generally of a right-wing evangelical variety.  It was annoying, but its strident tone, disreputable methodology[7], and its often easily refuted falsehoods often kept it from being particularly effective.

President Cracroft indicated that he saw a shift coming.  We would be increasingly exposed to attacks on our faith “from those who will claim to be our friends.”  Active members of the Church, acting from prominent positions within society and academia would not leave the Church, but would undermine it from within, all the while claiming to be “trying to help us.”

It was a thought that has stuck with me.  And it is a forewarning that I have recently seen come to pass.  The old-fashioned anti-mormons were, for all their faults, and all their falsehoods, at least open and honest about this: that they were our enemies, and they wanted to undermine our faith and lead people away from it.  This is an important point.  I have no particular beef with those who decide they do not believe in the truth claims of Mormonism.  Many of those truth claims are truly remarkable, and most of the world has been skeptical from the outset.  If the demographics of the Church as described by Nephi (who saw the members of the Church on every continent, but everywhere in smaller numbers than the nonbelievers) hold true, that will always be the case.  I don’t even have any particular concern about those, be they fundamentalist evangelicals or fundamentalist secular materialists, who decide it is their mission in life to help poor straying Latter-day Saints escape from the so-called falsehoods of our faith and be brought into the light of truth and knowledge.  I think it’s a silly way to spend one’s life and energies, but hey, whatever gets you motivated to wake up in the morning.  Under God’s plan, it’s a free universe, and we can take sides on whatever issue we want to, be it historical, political, scientific, or theological, without any bolts of thunder coming down from the skies to blot us from the earth.  If you are sincere in your belief that you are doing God’s, or the universe’s, work, your heart is not mine to judge (though, in many cases, I reserve the right to question that sincerity).  My beef is with those modern dissidents from the Church who aren’t honest with themselves or others concerning what they are about.

Many in the new generation of Mormon critics fall into this far more deceptive and disingenuous category than old school fundamentalist Christians with their anti-Mormon, anti-Catholic, anti-JW, anti-Seventh Day Adventist, tracts.  “We’re here to help” claims an anti-Mormon web site deceptively designed to appear like a place where prospective LDS missionaries can go for counsel.  “I’m here to help the church” by making it toe my own particular political lines, proclaim so many in the dissident bloggernacle.  “I’m here to help” says one of the more prominent anti-Mormon podcast hosts who has recently made himself the center of a media frenzy by rushing letters from his priesthood leaders to national news organizations.  “He’s here to help and the church should embrace him” parrot his followers, as they post their trolling comments on pro-LDS blogs, not bothering to mention that they themselves have become adversarial to the Church, as you will find if you click on their profiles and follow them to their own sites.  An acquaintance of mine recently shared a blog post from one of these currently trendy apostates, which my acquaintance was apparently much moved by.  I found the experience of reading it somewhat akin to dissecting a frog: “OK, I see the bit of emotional sophistry being deployed here, but I’m not sure why anyone would find it effective.  I’m surprised he didn’t work harder to avoid that logical fallacy in the second paragraph, and that logical leap in the third.  Huh, that’s an interesting double-standard there.”  Etc.  The whole process left me bewildered that anyone I know could have fallen for this stuff.  Maybe he watches too much cable television and his brain has turned to mush.  I dunno. If someone is ever going to push me out of the Church, and make me forsake the thousands of manifestations of the Spirit which have crafted my testimony, please, please, please, for the sake of my own pride, at least let him be someone who is bright and has something original or compelling to offer me, not this cheap reheated pottage.

Nevertheless, this stuff is out there, and some people apparently find it convincing, so in the hopes of offering some of my own inoculations to anyone who might be interested, here’s a list of a few of the disingenuous sophistries of the new anti-Mormon advocates that I find particularly annoying, and my own responses to the same.  This is not a list of specific critical claims about Church history or doctrine.  There are plenty of Mormon defenders of the faith doing fine work on the internet and elsewhere with respect to those specific issues, and I would defer to them, because I don’t have their credentials, nor their patience in dealing with subjects that I often find boring and tedious.  This is, rather, a list of rhetorical devices and methods utilized by the new Mormon dissidents for presenting the context of their claims, which I find to be disingenuous and full of sophistry.

The List.  Some Currently Prevalent Disingenuous Sophistries and Why They Annoy Me and Should Be Challenged.  

1.  The “We’re here to help the Church” sophistry (See also the “I’m just asking questions” meme).

Is it possible that fair consideration of difficult subjects in Mormon history or doctrine will “help” the Church and its members?  That critical questions can lead to more accurate information from the Church, about the Church?  Sure it is.  Some of the best historical research on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, to take just one of many possible examples, has been done by faithful Latter-day Saints.  The earliest of that research was not always initially welcome, but it was necessary, and the Church ultimately embraced it and has published straightforward accounts of the matter in its own publications.  Addressing that painful chapter in our Church’s history can be an important step against such an episode ever being repeated, just as the study of U.S. history needs to include frank evaluations of slavery, dealings with Native-Americans, WWII Japanese internment camps, and other subjects that we don’t necessarily bring up on the 4th of July, but still need to know.

So, how can I personally tell when someone is truly trying to “help” and when someone is engaged in an attack on my faith?  In part, to paraphrase a famous remark by a Supreme Court Justice on another topic: I know it when I see it. When I read Juanita Brooks’ account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, for example, I could tell she was writing as a fair and objective historian, seeking to discover and lay out the facts and let the chips fall where they may. She did not unnecessarily sensationalize the facts.  But she also did not downplay them.  She was not putting these facts on the table in order to embarrass or discomfit but simply to tell the story of what occurred.  She had no agenda but telling the truth.  She did not write in order to convince anyone that a particular political or doctrinal policy change was necessary.  Nor did she act the part of Shakespeare’s lady who doth protest too much, by loudly and stridently and zealously proclaiming that she had “no agenda but truth” or, no agenda but “just asking questions.”  She didn’t need to do that because her writing spoke for itself and made that clear.  She simply told the story, as best she could with the tools available to her.

There is, by contrast, a tone in much of the “we’re here to help” sophistries of today’s Mormon dissident bloggernacle that gives their game away.  They insist, frequently and loudly, that they are merely doing what other truer scholars have actually done, just helping, just asking questions.  But in their frequent repetition of this claim, and in the stridency with which they make it, they doth protest too much.  A wise man once told me I should always be cautious about doing business with any company that had the word “honest” in its name.  Do you want your car repaired by “Honest Joe’s Honest Repair Shop”?  Probably not. If objective scholarship were what the new Mormon dissidents were truly about, they could just go about their work, and their writings and publications would speak that truth for themselves.  But they don’t.  Their writings convey a different spirit altogether.  Their tone is gleeful when making any point that might embarrass, sneering and pedantic when posting memes showing some quote from a prior era which conflicts with some new emphasis, narcissistic when comparing the humble writer to the leaders of the Church, strident and agenda-driven in presenting arguments based upon cherry-picked historical anecdotes, rather than merely presenting all of the relevant history for its own sake, the good and the bad, the divine and the mortal, that which inspires and that which reminds us of human error and folly, all presented in context.

Political writing offers a handy analogy. You want to help a political party? Then don’t parrot the other political party’s talking points under the guise of “trying to help you understand why so many Americans disagree with your agenda.”  You want to write objective political journalism and political history which helps neither side and without an editorial agenda beyond asking questions and getting at the answers?  Then quote from both sides and get sources in both camps to help you tell your tale, and present both sides’ fairly.  But don’t tell me, loudly and insistently and stridently, that all you’re doing here is objective journalism, when it’s clear from the tone of what you produce that you’re really doing partisan editorial commentary under the guise of journalism.  Follow these same rules whether you’re writing about politics or faith or science or any other subject and you won’t insult my intelligence or demean your own integrity.  There is a perfectly legitimate place for editorial commentary and partisan attacks in this world, so if that’s what you are selling just be up-front about it.  Don't lie about your intent or your product and you can do so with integrity.  The same is true of modern Mormon dissidents.  If you are interested in doing objective scholarly research, by all means, do so, and then let what you have written speak for itself.  If you are interested in attacking the Church, have at it, it's your right to do so, but be honest about it from the get-go, without hiding who you are and what you intend.

The same is true of the “we’re just asking questions” meme.  There are, to take one currently trending example, perfectly legitimate questions to be asked about why women are not ordained to the priesthood on this earth.  I have heard many explanations, some of them more convincing than others, but none of them has ever, to my knowledge, been adopted as official Church doctrine.  Based thereon, I would not find anything particularly offensive about some group who honestly wanted the Church to clarify the reasons for this practice, if the Church is able to do so.  But a group which claims to be “just asking questions” while marching under a name which belies the possibility that there may be any legitimate answers to the inquiry, and while issuing statements demanding not answers to questions but policy changes dictated under various “or else” threats, is not just asking questions, and when they claim to be doing so, they are making a false statement, plain and simple.  If you want to demand changes to church policies and doctrines, despite the fact that such demands deny one of the core doctrines of the Church, that we are led by revelation and prophets, seers and revelators, fine, have at it, do your worst.  And if you want to make your demands through political showmanship, all to the delight of a secular news media which holds a deep antipathy towards people of faith and will be delighted by the fodder you are feeding them, then good for you, enjoy your 15 minutes.  But do your soul a favor and be honest about what you are doing, and don’t claim to be engaged in a task which is directly contrary to everything you say and everything you do.

2.  The sophistry that if you disagree with the new Mormon dissidents, it is because you are “anti-intellectual.”  

There is an underlying assumption among many of the modern critics of Faith in general and of Mormonism in particular, that if only the members of the Church knew this or that uncomfortable fact about  history, or heard some cherry-picked politically incorrect quotation from an old-time church leader, then we would take off our blinders and be lead to the salvation of secular humanism. The reason you are not on my path, they will tell you, is because you just aren’t as smart as me.  The reason you dislike my scholarship, they say, is because you are against scholars.  You are an anti-intellectual, unwilling to study the truths and come to the same understandings and conclusions as your betters.  Here's a recent version of this particular sophistry:

“Sadly, the Mormon faith has become a place that incentivizes the survival of the least fit. Since strict obedience is demanded and harshly enforced, only the least talented, least articulate, least nuanced thinkers, least likely to take a stand against abuse, and the least courageous people thrive in the Church today.”  Kate Kelly, founder of “Ordain Women,” in The Guardian (6 February 2015).

So there you have it folks.  Don't agree with the new Mormon dissidents?  There's only one possible explanation, you are not as "nuanced" a thinker as you need to be.  Cause if there's one thing we all know about Ms. Kelly, it's that she is nuanced.  Also, you are not as "fit" nor as "talented" nor as "articulate" as your betters who have taken up the cause of left-wing assimilationist Mormon dissidentry.   (See how I had to make up a non-existent word to make my point in that last sentence?  It's because I'm insufficiently articulate to use real English.)  Finally, you are simply not as "courageous" as you should be.  How does such a person manage to stay alive without suffocating on her own narcisissm?  Oh, that's right, it's because she's so "fit" for survival.

These tired claims of anti-intellectualism apparently sound sufficiently compelling to some that they have followed the pied pipering of Ms. Kelly, Mr. Dehlin, and their ilk, in search of a far off promised land, where they, too, may be admitted into the club of the "fit" and the "articulate" and the "courageous".  

Meanwhile, in the real world, intellectualism doesn’t really work the way the dissidents claim, especially for people who keep on studying.

Let me discuss U.S. history as an imperfect but handy analogy to scholarship on the Church.  Broadly speaking, there are three types of U.S. historians: First, there are what we might call “patriotic historians” those who write inspiring history which instills patriotism, but who may sometimes be accused of engaging in advocacy or hagiography more than objective scholarship. (These might run the gamut from people like Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough, one of my favorite writers, with his incredibly engaging and uplifting books, like John Adams and Truman, to more specifically partisan, typically conservative, authors producing more in-your-face works, favoring titles such as “The Real Thomas Jefferson” or “The politically incorrect guide to the Constitution" or "A Patriots History of the United States.").  Secondly, there are those who are genuinely interested in objectively studying and writing about U.S. history without any particularly political motivation with respect to scouring the past for ammunition in some modern political controversy, who seek to understand the motives of those who occupied any particular time period on the terms which those people themselves understood, and who are willing to give us the good, the bad, and the ugly, let the chips fall where they may, of our past.  We might call this group the “objective academic historians.”  (Pulitzer Prize Winner Gordon S. Wood, one of America’s most well-respected academic scholars on early American history, would be my favorite author in this camp.  I consider his books Revolutionary Characters and The Idea of America to be essential reading.  They have introduced me to ideas and worldviews and preoccupations held by the founders which are completely alien to us today, because they arose from a society which no longer exists, which has helped me to understand that the founders' viewpoints cannot always be marshalled for some modern ideological purpose as easily as we think.)  Finally, there are those who dislike America, see her as her enemies see her, and believe that the “truth” of American history is essentially ugly, and write to persuade us to see ourselves in the way that the Soviet Union's citizens saw us, as an enemy of progressive forces trying to create a better and more benevolent world.  We might term this group the “negative narrators”.  Scholars in this camp regard the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as only dead white male slaveholders who couldn’t possibly have advanced any principle or value worth remembering or fighting to maintain and transmit to the next generation.   (Howard Zinn would be one obvious example, but much of modern scholarship on U.S. History falls under this same hostile, hostilely revisionist, and deconstructionist agenda.  That the student leaders of the California State University system recently voted to require that system to remove all U.S. investments, because of the evils of America, demonstrates the hold the negative narrators currently enjoy in higher education.)

I have a great love for certain patriotic historians and for some objective academic historians.  Patriotic history is  perfectly legitimate and fulfills an important need.  A nation, to remain sufficiently homogenous to be and remain a nation, instead of several balkanized factions, needs to have some shared sense of gratitude for what makes their country great, for what ideals it stands upon, and why those ideals matter.  Our feelings for our nation ought to be capable of being expressed in poetry, not only in prose.  Our nation’s citizens ought to get teary eyed when we hear our national anthem or see our flag flying at half-mast.  It makes our country stronger.  Sometimes, I want to be inspired by heroes.  I want to be moved by the story of our nation’s earliest citizens’ and their stand for freedom and liberty.  I want to be grateful for those who wrote, fought, and politically finangled to end slavery.  I want to be thrilled at our nation’s successful 20th Century stands against totalitarianism abroad, in WWII and the Cold War.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  In fact, the gratitude I feel for my nation from reading such history makes life better.

There’s also, of course, a place for more objective history.  We ought to know the dark side of American history.  We ought to know about slavery, the displacement of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, Jim Crow, and the exploitation of labor in the sweatshops of the industrial revolution.  We ought to be exposed to objective history from the past in order to learn about values and worldviews held by earlier generations which have been lost to us.  The work of objective academic scholars can provide us with a nuanced view of history that can prevent our patriotism from turning into parochial jingoism, help us avoid jumping onto simple-minded political bandwagons, and help us to understand and learn to deal with the inherent ambiguities in life.  Sometimes, however, the nuanced view can also remind us that patriotism is legitimate.  An open-minded and objective study of U.S. history will not always lead us to negative conclusions, despite the contentions of those in the third camp.  The more we know, the more we might come to see that the founders, for all their faults and fights and bickering, and for all the ways in which they were beholden to and creatures of their own times and the value systems of those times, were nevertheless, still truly remarkable men.  We may just find, when we reach a higher level of knowledge and understanding, that some of the founders, in certain of their best moments, really were the great and noble men our elementary school teachers taught us about (or at least did when I was that age), despite the warts and weaknesses our more cynical High School and college teachers so loved to share.  For example, scholarly historian Gordon S. Wood, who has forgotten more about the founding era than most of us will ever know, and writes without blinders about the strengths and the weaknesses of our first leading citizens, has a chapter in his book, Revolutionary Characters which is entitled, simply and without irony: The Greatness of George Washington.

Even the work of the negative narrators has potential value, in exposing historical events which don’t always make the textbooks, and describing the viewpoints of those who stood on the fringes of history.  But much of the negative narrators’ work is ultimately just . . . negative.  Many negative narrators revile patriotic history, refusing to concede its point or purpose, not because their own viewpoints are any more true, but because their cynicism blinds them to light and virtue, and their arrogance makes them despise any viewpoint but their own. You can see this from how often they also revile academic historians, if their work fails to reach the same partisan political opinions which motivates the negative narrators.  But, more relevant to the point here, this is the group which sound most like certain modern Mormon dissidents in their insistence that if you do not see the world the way they see it, you are an anti-intellectual and stupid person (suffering from a lack of "nuance" "courage" or intelligence):  "You don’t hate my scholarship because it’s unpatriotic.  You hate my scholarship because you hate scholarship; because you are not as bright or enlightened or as sophisticated I am. You reject my writings because you are simple-minded, blinded by naivete and jingoism, part of the bourgeois problem" etc.  But this is bogus. There are plenty of smart and scholarly and academically serious people who don’t buy the premises of Howard Zinn.

Indeed, members of camp three are often far more simpleminded and blind to any evidence that undercuts their assumptions than are members of camp one.  An approach to history premised on an attitude of “always assume the worst” is no less simpleminded than “always assume the best.”   The most zealous proponents of the negative narrative (and this is where you will find zealousness if you are looking for it) are often far less willing to recognize the ambiguity and nuance in history than are those who want their history patriotic and inspiring.  The believers in an inspiring and patriotic view of American history are, typically, willing to concede that the Country’s past has included dark episodes and undercurrents that we should study and know about.  The negative narrators, by contrast, are often unwilling to concede that there is anything meritorious or virtuous about America’s past, or its present, and take every patriotic story as an affront and opportunity for pedantic critique.

A similar dynamic plays itself out among those who write about Church history and doctrine.  Many fine and faithful writers have approached the Church’s history in a manner designed to inspire, show its beauty and poetry, and engage, uplift, edify, and inspire.  And despite the critiques of the new Mormon dissidents, that is just as it should be.   Such works can help us stay true to the path and cling to the rod through difficult times in our mortal journey.  They can uplift us, call us to be something more, inspire us to repent, help us see the history of the Church and the paradigms offered by its doctrines in all their grandeur.  The study of such works of history, doctrine, literature, music, etc., are important places for us to spend our time and nourish our testimonies. We ought to go there frequently, and help ourselves to blow our personal trumps of testimony without an uncertain sound.

Is there a time and a place for more straightforward and objective history?  Absolutely, and in the works of people like Richard Bushman, and others, we can find the Latter-day Saint equivalents to Gordon Wood.  Some people will read these more frank histories and be troubled by them.  They will let the humanity in the church obscure the divinity of the Church. Others will read such works and not only still be able to see the grandeur of the truth of Mormonism, but will perhaps have an even keener appreciation for the miracle of this Church having sprung forth from truly obscure beginnings, and a deeper appreciation for how God works his mighty plans through small and simple things, using very mortal tools, with feet of clay, for the building of both the tool and the Kingdom.

Then there are the new Mormon dissidents: claiming the mantle of objective scholarship when in truth and fact they are just as one-sided in their approaches as they claim the uplifting narratives to be.  If there is an inspiring story to be found in the annals of Mormonism, they ignore it, doubt it without any evidence for doing so, and then move on to preaching to their own choirs in a voice and with a purpose that will not allow for even the possibility of any dissent from their own conclusions. They are free to advocate for their conclusions, but as they do so they should be open with themselves and their audience about who they are and who we are: they are to the LDS Church what communist deconstructionist American historians are to America, cranky advocates for their own opinions, so blinded by their own worldview that they have no ability to temper that view with the possibility of nuance or ambiguity.   It is, more often than not, they, not the faithful, who have left the road of seeking after truth, and have become anti-intellectual in the certainty of their opinions, and the blinders they wear against any other possibilities.

I suspect that if I were transported in a time machine back to the era of Moses, and I learned intimate details of Moses’s personality and day to day life, I would find much of what I learned, to be, from my perspective as a 21st Century American, odd, unsettling, politically incorrect, even horrifying. Ditto for Peter, James and John.  I suspect the same would be true, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree, if I were transported back more recently in time to Joseph Smith’s day.   Some of this would be based on cultural differences that would blindside me, and some of it would be the realization that these men put their pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else.   If a skeptic or a new-fangled Mormon dissident wants to take me on that journey, my answer would be the same as if I had traveled there myself: So, what’s your point?  These men were either Prophets or they were not.  That they had mortal flaws and weaknesses which Satan would have exploited to the highest degree possible, that they were people very much of their own time and their own place, I already knew. That doesn’t mean they weren’t also Prophets.  In fact, their feet of clay actually makes me admire their stories even more.  Look what they accomplished, in the forging of a new faith and a new people, in the bringing forth of scripture, in the realization of Moses’s dream of a kingdom of priests, despite all of that.

3.  The claim that the Church is on the wrong side of history.

Much of the new anti-Mormonism grows out of modern left-wing politics, which has become increasingly bold in its radicalism in recent decades, despite the historical evidence which mounted throughout the 20th century  of the core weaknesses, and horrendous outcomes, which are precipitated by the application of its precepts.  For those whose dissent stems from a left wing political agenda, claiming that the Church is on the wrong side of history, in its male priesthood or in its views on the meaning of marriage, has become a powerful rhetorical tool.  In response, I would offer the following statement from a Catholic conservative, who has been confronted with the same type of arguments from the more liberal members of his religion.

Here is Robert P. George, speaking in 2014, at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C., in a speech entitled, “Am I ashamed of the Gospel” : “These forces tell us that our defeat in the causes of marriage and human life are inevitable. They warn us that we are on the wrong side of history. They insist that we will be judged by future generations the  way we today judge those who championed racial injustice in the Jim Crow south. But history does not have sides. It is an impersonal and contingent sequence of events, events that are determined in decisive ways by human deliberation, judgment, choice, and action. The future of marriage and of countless human lives can and will be determined by our judgments and choices, our willingness or unwillingness to bear faithful witness, our acts of courage or cowardice. Nor is history, or future generations, a judge invested with god-like powers to decide, much less dictate, who was right and who was wrong. The idea of a judgment of history is secularism’s vain, meaningless, hopeless, and pathetic attempt to devise a substitute for what the great Abrahamic traditions of faith know is the final judgment of Almighty God. History is not God. God is God. History is not our judge. God is our judge.  One day we will give an account of all we have done and failed to do. Let no one suppose that we will make this accounting to some impersonal sequence of events possessing no more power to judge than a golden calf or a carved and painted totem pole. It is before God, the God of truth, the Lord of history, that we will stand. And as we tremble in His presence it will be no use for any of us to claim that we did everything in our power to put ourselves on the right side of history.”

If the 20th century taught us anything, it is that ideological fantasies which ignore fundamental truths and realities of human nature, sooner or later, hit reality.  This is true of all fantastical ideological propositions, no matter how seemingly virtuous and well-meaning, no matter how passionately believed in, no matter how socially impossible, in a given time or place, to dissent from.  The fantasy of communism, with its unwillingness to confront the truth of human nature, held sway for decades in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but eventually crashed against the realities it was trying to ignore.  If current trends are any guide, we will no doubt pretend, for many decades hence, that human beings do not come in two sexes, that chromosomes have nothing to do with your sex, which is instead based on your own purely subjective and internal feelings, that children do not need both a mother and a father, and that there is no reason why sex, marriage, procreation, and child-rearing should be thought of as necessarily integrated concepts.  Our Church will no doubt face a great degree of hostility and pressure and persecution if we refuse to bow to these ideological winds.  Our children and grandchildren will no doubt be taught that there was something cruel, primitive, and unenlightened about their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, for holding views which were heretofore held by virtually every society on earth for thousands of generations, regarding sexual morality.  They will be taught to scoff at the idea that, as sex’s most important biological function is procreative, any sound sexual ethic requires an institution which fosters commitment between the men and women whose sexual activities produce new human beings, and that, based thereon, the whole point of matrimony was essentially and distinctively to foster male-female unions, and to encourage abstinence outside of such unions.  But the damage that is already being done to human beings raised in the shifting family structures of a society which clings to these new, anti-scientific, biologically insane, fantasies, will eventually become too overwhelmingly obvious for even the most obtuse among future generations to ignore.  The end of the story has already been written, in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, called The Gods of the Copybook Headings.  It tells a sad story, but one that always keeps repeating itself.  To determine who is truly on the “wrong side of history” is the work of generations and centuries, not years and decades, and requires us to take the long view, and have the courage to withstand the pressures of the current view.  Our age’s instapundits, welding sitcom stereotypes of any who dare dissent from the new orthodoxies of our age, are not up to the task.  

4.  Comparing the Church to Civil Institutions, and Averring that the Same Rules of Appropriate Conduct Apply to Both.

Much of the commentary offered by the new Mormon dissidents uses political rhetoric which might be politically useful in critiquing a government or a civil society, to critique the Church.  Thus, we are told that the rules governing conduct on Temple Square, make the place a little like Red China. Or that the Church is too intolerant of dissent, or too unwilling to learn from those who offer their services as a loyal opposition.

The problem with such arguments is that they misunderstand a vitally important fact: A church is not a government.  The rules which apply to creating a good government are not the same as the rules which apply to creating a good church.

The views of classical western liberalism (now known as 21st  Century conservatism) with respect to an appropriately constituted government include certain concepts which we utilize to judge the dangers to liberty and freedom which a government might start posing if it strays from those concepts, including concepts designed to prevent the government from becoming totalitarian. (Ironically, much of the modern left who are so happy to cheer-lead the Mormon dissidents making these arguments against the Church, would like to remove these concepts from our understanding of the rules of civil society, as inimical to their vision for changing that society--but I digress.)

These concepts include the idea that there should be no "political heresies"; that political parties which rotate peacefully in and out of power are important to allow for a loyal opposition and freedom of thought without fear of punishment or reprisal, that a healthy society will allow for and tolerate widely divergent viewpoints, without thought police, etc.  I believe in all of those concepts as applicable to judging the current state of America, and to the extent that America seems to be diverging from those principles (as in the recent threats and public discrimination against anyone who does not tow the line in upholding the new political orthodoxy on same sex marriage) we will all be worse off.  But here's the deal: a church is not a civil government, and while some of the principles we use to judge civil governments and civil societies may be usefully applied to other social institutions, this application can be taken too far, and lead us to forget the fundamental differences between a church and a nation.

A church is a private, not a public, institution.  Membership and participation in a church, and complying with the rules of behavior required of those who wish to so participate, is purely voluntary.  It is, by contrast, not typically legally possible to easily disclaim one's citizenship in a nation.  Nor are the laws which we are required to comply with as citizens of a nation voluntary in nature.  The penalty for violating such laws is not exclusion from the nation, but imprisonment within the nation.

By way of example, the Supreme Court has ruled as follows, in a case upholding the religious liberty of a Jehovah Witness who did not wish to pledge allegiance to the flag as a condition to attending public school:  "[N]o official, high or petty, can [under our Constitution] prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." (Justice Jackson, W. Va State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)[emphasis added].)   In another case, the following ruling was announced: -"Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief [i.e., a belief a particular citizen believes to be repugnant] nor penalize or discriminate against individuals because they hold religious views abhorrent to the authorities."  Justice Brennan, Sherbert v. Verner (1963).

These are beautiful statements of the civil principles which distinguished America and other liberal western democracies from the totalitarian governments which offered a competing vision during the Cold War (and which are now under attack in America by the very leftist ideologues who love to champion and write news articles sympathetic to the new Mormon dissidents who claim that the Church violates these principles, while concurrently working to violate these principles themselves in the governmental sphere, and to establish new political orthodoxies and penalize and discriminate against individuals because they hold religious views abhorrent to the authorities--but again I digress).  For present purposes, the vitally important fact about these two Supreme Court explanations of our Constitutional rights, is that they are designed, by the very vocabulary used therein, to differentiate government from religion.  It is because a government is not a religion, that government should neither require "orthodoxy" nor create tests of citizenship which involve holding orthodox belief systems.  But to aver that a religion may not propogate orthodoxy about the tenets of its own faith is to deny the very nature of what a religion is.  Similarly, to claim that a religion should not propogate certain beliefs, and should not be concerned with what its members believe, as a prerequisite for holding certain callings or participating in certain ordinances is to misapply a standard applicable to one type of institution, to another type of institution altogether.  (It should be noted here that the list of things which a faithful Mormon is expected to believe to be considered orthodox, is really fairly short, consisting of only the most basic of doctrines, covering approximately 4 of the Temple Recommend questions.  Even as to those core doctrines, moreover, much, much, more than a waffling belief, or even an outright lack of belief, would be necessary before the Church might deem it necessary to take any formal action to remove an individual from the Church's membership rolls as a result of apostasy.  As the case of John Dehlin shows, even years of overtly hostile attacks will only lead to a person's name removal on grounds of apostasy when it becomes overwhelmingly clear that no further attempts at reconciliation are possible.  Meanwhile, every ward in the Church has lots of names on its rolls who consist of no-longer-active and no-longer-practicing and no-longer-believing members whose names the Church takes no formal action to remove.  The criteria for remaining a member of the Church are very, very, low, especially in matters of orthodoxy of belief or level of activity; and the hope of working with members to reengage them in the faith is very, very, high.)

This is not to say that a church has nothing to learn from a comparison of a church's principles of self governance and the principles of self governance applicable to other institutions, including governmental or societal institutions.  It is entirely possible that certain helpful principles and best practices might be derived from such an effort.   Nevertheless, any comparison of a church to a civil institution based on hostility to the former or made in an effort to critique or criticize is an unfair apples to oranges approach, which will, either by design or inevitability, produce more heat than light. It should also be noted that, even in those civil governments which are based on and seek to emulate the principles of classical western liberalism, it is still possible to commit treason, and the government is still allowed to protect itself from advocates for its overthrow and dissolution. Similarly, even if the critiques of the Church for not abiding by principles which, by their nature, do not apply to private religious bodies, were helpful, it would nevertheless still remain perfectly appropriate for the Church to revoke the membership of individuals who have dedicated their lives to destroying the Church and leading its members away from the Church.  In that regard at least, the applicable standards by which a church and a civil government may be judged, do share one thing in common.


FIRST POSTED: September 27, 2014
LAST UPDATED: February 10, 2015
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ENDNOTES

1.  In the course of writing this post, I tried to remember and find the precise article in question, but my research led me to discover that there was more than one candidate, and I couldn’t remember which article about the historical Jesus I'd been reading when I’d had this experience, though I still vividly remember the thoughts I had at the time, from having completed Lewis's tome.  The “historical Jesus” has apparently been a recurring theme in certain magazines, and my own memory of things I once read or ideas I was once exposed to has become so full that not only years, but decades, are now starting to collapse in on themselves in my mind.

2.  That’s the phonetic spelling for English speakers: it should actually be spelled “Der Praes” or “Der Präs” as a shortcut for Der Praesident, with the German “s” pronounced as an English “z.”

3. President Cracroft knew and was friendly with Nibley, who was a member of his Stake, and President Cracroft introduced me to the book, Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless, which contains some of Nibley’s easier-to-read and pithier articles, while nevertheless advising me that some critics did not agree with Nibley’s bone-to-pick style of scholarship.

4.  This article has a special place in my heart.  When I read it, it prompted me to write President an email of appreciation, the first time I had communicated with him in many years.  His response e-mail to me, full of encouragement, became one of my most prized possessions, especially as he passed away shortly thereafter, and this was the last time I ever heard from him.

5.  There are few things in life that will ever bond two people together quite as quickly as finding that they both roll their eyes in response to the same stimuli.

6.  Anyone who has been on an LDS Mission can imagine and should be familiar with the scene.  A group of Elders and a couple of Sisters are visiting in the mission home, waiting for a nice meal featuring a culturally appropriate dish (raclette, of course, for Schweizer missionare) whose aromas they can smell wafting in from the kitchen, to be followed by their final counsel from their Mission President, a testimony meeting, and then off to bed before catching tomorrow’s flight home, where they will be released of their mantles, to much mixed emotion.  As I recall it, President Benson had recently given a pulpit-thumping General Conference speech, calling on any bachelors within earshot who might be getting a bit long in the tooth to repent, rise up, be men and do their duty.  Inevitably, given the subject matter, the speech had become the topic of some degree of humorous commentary.  Spotting the most recent Conference Ensign on the table, I found the speech, which we’d all heard about, but not yet read, and began finding the good parts to read to my flight group, the perfect audience for this particular address, as we were not yet RM’ed, and so too young to be guilty of the sin at issue, but knew that avoiding the fate of these aging bachelors was to be our next duty.  I tried to muster as much pseudo-brimstone as I could in my voice, as I read the most strident passages, to what I felt was great comic effect and a lot of laughter, when der Prez came into the room and jokingly berated me for stealing his thunder, while simultaneously giving me precisely the correct look to convey that, though he loved me, I was being a little irreverent with what was after all prophetic counsel, and that I should perhaps tone it down a little.  Oh, how I miss that man.  I had not, in fact, stolen his thunder.  The topics for the evening ran far afield of President Benson’s talk, though it was of course referenced.

7.  My first exposure to the dishonest methodology of the antis of my mission era was on the plane from Salt Lake City to Chicago, where we would be boarding our Swissair flight to Zuerich.  My companion and I found ourselves sitting next to a man who asked us to give him a list of reasons why we believed Joseph Smith was a Prophet.  After a bit of debate that followed, he revealed that he was a member of a group calling itself “Ex-Mormons for Jesus.”  When I asked when he had left the church, he revealed he had never been Mormon.  When I asked by what right he then called himself an “Ex-Mormon for Jesus” he explained the rhetorical importance of the name, and indicated that whenever his group set up their booths at various Christian gatherings, they always tried to find at least one actual “Ex-Mormon” to be on hand, even though he eventually conceded that most of the group’s membership did not actually fit the title.  That was what it took for me to write him off as someone so intellectually dishonest as to not be worth spending any more time on.  I enjoyed my nap on the rest of the flight.